Facebook became a "beast that spreads hatred against muslims"

Stevens moves on to Myanmar, where Facebook has been implicated in violence against the Rohingya minority.

“I went to the refugee camps last November. The UN has accused Facebook of playing a role in the violence, saying social media has been exploited to spread hate speech. Just last month the UN said your platform had morphed into a ‘beast’ that spreads hatred against Rohingya muslims.”

Schroepfer says that in regions like this, “where there is hate and dehumanisation in the region, the answer is to get more people on the ground who know the region, we need more policy people on the ground. We need to, and are, trying to get a lot more to get hate speech and all of this vile content off the platform.

“We’ve been working in Myanmar a long time, I don’t know when exactly we decided to amp up the product teams on the ground.

“There are some challenges on the technical level. There’s a language there that we don’t have a lot of tools in, that’s not Burmese. In this region, the goal is to have people who can respond, not just quickly, but adequately. On a technical level, the work we’ve done in English, we’re trying to work out how to translate that into Burmese.”

Jo Stevens returns to Alex Kogan, Joseph Chancellor and GSR. When did Facebook know of the links?

“It is possible someone in Facebook knew about this and didn’t tell the rest of the organisation. 2017 is when legal, the investigation in to this, knew about it, but a recruiter may have known sooner.”

Stevens again asks how Facebook can take such a “direct and critical” line with Aleksandr Kogan but continue to ignore Joseph Chancellor.

“We are investigating his involvement in this now,” Schroepfer says. “I believe he works on virtual reality and some other things like that.

“I learned about much of this very recently, so that’s the full situation.”

“Among the things you’ll see is spend, who they were trying to advertise to, and some basic information about how much it was viewed,” says Schroepfer. “Basically all the information you would want to know about who was advertising in an election and how.”

Collins turns to the FTC’s consent decree with Facebook. Have the required audits been undertaken, he asks.

“They were.”

Why did they not catch the issues with Aleksandr Kogan’s apps?

“I do not know… we were looking at these issues all the time. Not just with the FTC, the Irish DPC had gone through all these issues as well.”

Collins: How much data does Facebook share with governments or get from governments about citizens?

“I don’t know if we do. We’ll do research collaborations with aggregate data.”

Collins:“If I downloaded my data, would any government data be included?”

Scrhoepfer seems baffled by the question, uncertain what government data Collins might be referring to, but notes that Facebook’s transparency reports share information about government requests for data.

Collins asks about Facebook’s tool to let users download their information, in compliance with GDPR. It doesn’t let users download information that the company has gathered about them off the site, he notes.

“You can get that, I know that it’s in the ads tools, it might be part of the DYI tools, I think. We’re trying to show it as we use it.” In other words, it won’t contain a list of sites you’ve visited, but might contain a list of things Facebook has worked out from your browsing.

Collins asks if you can get that information if you don’t have a Facebook account, and Schroepfer says no, because the company doesn’t know who you are. Collins asks if you could ask for information gathered from a specific device, which Facebook does know, and Schroepfer says you still can’t, because “I have no way to verify with you that that’s actually your device.

“There are challenging issues here because we’re not storing information about you, just about your device.”

Collins says he is pretty confident that refusal will lead to some legal test cases.

A final question from Matheson: “is it possible that Facebook could attach a ‘little rider’ to every video uploaded to Facebook to say who the original uploader was? If I uploaded a video onto Facebook you could upload something saying that it was first uploaded by Chris Matheson?”

Schroepfer notes it would be possible, but may not be the most important aspect of advertising transparency. “Your general idea of providing much more information about the source is right.”

Matheson: It just strikes me that if someone’s name has to be attached to a new advert or story, it’s likely to be more legal, honest, open and truthful.

Collins breaks the news to Schroepfer – and me – that Mark Zuckerberg has agreed to give evidence to the European Parliament, while the committee has been ongoing. “We still do need the opportunity to put some of these questions to him,” said Collins.

“What has frustrated us has been a pattern of behaviour, an unwillingness to engage. When we asked Facebook if it would investigate on the same terms that it had in America, it refused to do so and then changed its mind. When we had our session in Washington we asked… expressly about data breaches. We since learned that the company knew an awful lot more than it told us, and we wouldn’t have learned any of that if it hadn’t been for investigative journalists.

“I hope you understand that Mr Lucas’ line of questioning reflects a frustration of many of us. I don’t think anyone looking at those transcripts from February would feel we were given straight answers.”

“He is trying to dedicate his time, in the office, to solving these problems. I’m trying to do my best to answer the questions. We thought, given you wanted to go into fake news, about our plans.”

“What we want is the truth. We didn’t get the truth back in February. There are millions of our constituents who are concerned about this. Don’t you think the right thing to do would be for him to come to us and explain why someone representing Facebook didn’t tell us the whole truth back in February?”

“I don’t know what he knew or didn’t know. I don’t know the specifics of it. I will do my best to tell you about these topics. That’s the best I can do.”

“Mr Schroepfer, you have a head of integrity? I remain unconvinced that your company has integrity.”

“I think Facebook concealed the truth from us in February.”

Ian Lucas hands Schroepfer some evidence Facebook gave the DCMS committee in February, at a session in Washington DC. It’s the transcript of a conversation between Chris Matheson and Simon Milner, a Facebook VP, in which Milner denies that Cambridge Analytica had any Facebook data.

“The reason we have re-opened this, as we all learned this month, is that there’s allegations Cambridge Analytica kept this data.

“At the time, this was accurate.”

Lucas disputes this, noting that in December 2015, Facebook was well aware that there had been a “data breach” that precipitated action. “Why did you not tell this committee about this when you gave us evidence in February? You had very specific knowledge as a company, in February, of what happened in this case. Why did you not tell us? Do you think that Mr Milner should have told us about the agreement between Cambridge Analytica and Facebook?

“I think Facebook concealed the truth from us in February.”

Schroepfer disagrees, arguing that Milner is an “honest man” who likely told the committee what he believed to be true at the time. “I’m guessing he didn’t know.”